The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
The water suddenly thrashed and boiled.
“Pa!” Chat screamed. He leaped backward. He felt the noose under his armpits pinch tight as Lefevre hauled in the line, hand over hand. Chat lost his footing, gagging on water pouring across his sun-bleached thatch and into his nose as Lefevre retrieved him like a wriggling minnow.
The man’s strength swooped him into the air, dumped him onto the deck. Supporting himself half-prone and blowing water from his lungs, Chat saw Lefevre out of the corner of his eyes. The towering figure was leveling a thirty-aught-six rifle at the charging alligator. The brute came like a half-submerged log fired from a catapult, leaving an angry wake.
Grinning broadly, Lefevre squeezed the trigger. The rifle-crack jolted through Chat. He turned his face away from the sight of the rolling convulsions, the sudden redness in the black-surfaced swamp water, as the ’gator died.
Lefevre slapped his thigh and his happy guffaw rang like a delayed echo of the rifle shot. “Boy, I got me a skin! It’ll fetch some fine black-market dollars so’s a citified gent can wear hisself a hundred-buck pair of alligator shoes!”
Lefevre usually drank to success, and this night was no exception. In his small room, Chat lay sleepless on his pallet, watching the reflections of a kerosene lamp dance about the doorway as Lefevre sat alone, drinking at the rough plank table in the next room. The man was already talking to himself and singing snatches of old Cajun songs in a broken French patois. Chat could predict the next hours accurately. His stepfather would drink himself into a stupor and brief peace would come to the unpainted, clapboard shanty set high on its stilts beneath a hoary old willow tree.
Chat wanted to sleep, but each time he closed his eyes that moment returned, that harrowing instant when he was sure the ’gator would get him. He’d never heard of a ’gator-baiting kid being eaten up. Their daddies, or uncles, or whoever they were poaching with always snaked them out, but the knowledge didn’t stop Chat’s imagination from working. He could see the unwinking ’gator eyes, the cotton-like interior of the jaws, the cruel teeth.
He clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. “I swear,” he sobbed to himself, “I can’t do it again.”
If Ma were still here, he wouldn’t have to; or Pa. His real pa had died so long ago from cottonmouth bite that Chat could hardly remember him, but he could recall his father’s contempt for the poachers, the black marketeers, the easy-dollar men who were killing off the alligators. Pa had been content to fish and hunt and go off for a few days at a time to work in the distant sawmill when he needed a hard dollar for sugar or gingham or coffee.
After Pa’s death, there’d just been Chat and Ma. Life had been very hard. There were few people so far back up in Big Shandy Swamp, and little a boy and his mother could do for a hard dollar. Ma’s sister, Aunt Mavis, had sent them a little money now and then, and they’d made out.
Then Lefevre had come courting in his secondhand suit and wrinkled necktie in the collar of his blue denim shirt. Chat suspected that Ma had married him because she felt her boy needed a father, a man about the place.
That hadn’t worked out very well, either. Ma had got a terrible pain in her side and before they could pack her out to the half-dozen sunbaked, slab-and-tin buildings of Rickel’s Crossing, much less a hospital, Ma had died from a ruptured appendix.
Aunt Mavis had come to the funeral, hugging Chat long and hard after it was over. She’d told Chat about the strange world far off yonder beyond the swamp, about Houston, Texas, where she made good money working as a waitress in a nice, clean restaurant, where she figured on marrying a fellow named Jim who drove a big trailer truck.
“He would’ve come,” Aunt Mavis had said, “but he was on a cross-country haul when word reached me about Sis. You’d like Jim, little Chat, and he would think the world of you. So you try and get your stepdaddy to let you come and stay with us a while. Even live with us. You’ve always got a home with us, Chat.”
Lefevre had squelched the idea before it could take root. “No dice, boy. I need you here, helping on the trap lines and fish nets and running of the house. You forget it, boy, quick and for good. This is your home. This is where you stay.”
A short time after that, Lefevre had taken to poaching, an activity that made Chat far more valuable than a prime, blooded, redbone hound dog.
The day after his drinking bout, Lefevre stayed in bed, sick, calling out to Chat now and then to bring him endless quantities of drinking water. He was red-eyed and gray-faced beneath his wild bush of black beard. It was no time to cross him, and Chat spent the hours weeding the garden patch where yams, corn, squash, and gourds grew.
The next morning, Lefevre was up and away early. Chat went fishing, content to be by himself, thankful he didn’t run into the Toutain or De Vaux boys. They were always up to something, and when their paths crossed Chat’s he was always in for some rough teasing.
He much preferred to think about Aunt Mavis, how kind and sweet she’d been, how nice she smelled when she’d hugged his neck. He wondered what her Jim looked like. He must be a fine fellow to rate a woman like Aunt Mavis. Chat suspected that they’d written him, perhaps even sent him a little money, but he had no way of knowing for sure. It was always Lefevre who went into Rickel’s Crossing, end of the line for mail.
The following morning, Chat was awakened by the grip of Lefevre’s heavy hand on his shoulder. The instant he opened his eyes, Lefevre’s face, glowing with greed and excitement, filled his vision.
“Get a move on, boy! We got us a big one today.” On one knee beside the pallet, Lefevre rubbed his palms and grinned in high glee. The morning light seemed to make every jet-black, curling hair about his ears, thick neck and heavy-boned face stand out individually. “Cut his sign working the trap lines yesterday. Almost under our noses, boy. Right over there in Berdine’s Lagoon. Claw marks and belly drag say he’s a whopper, twenty-five feet if he’s an inch!”
“Pa, I don’t feel so good,” Chat managed.
Lefevre’s grin faded. His face darkened. “Boy, how come you want to kill the real fine feeling of the day?”
“I can’t help the way I feel, Pa.”
“The devil you can’t!” He grabbed Chat by the shoulder and flung him to his feet. “I’ve heard the last of this I’m going to, boy! It’s time you got over it. You got a job of ’gator baiting to do, and you’re going to do it! I’m going to bust the yellow streak — or break you. You understand that?”
“Yes, Pa.” Teeth chattering. Chat snubbed the cord that belted his jeans.
“And don’t you forget it,” Lefevre warned. “Now you get in there and get ready. I’ve already cooked side meat and grits while you pampered your lazy head. You got exactly five minutes to eat your breakfast.”
With pasty grits and greasy sow-belly wadded in his throat, Chat moved through a morning that didn’t seem quite real. Details all stood out with a strangely sharp clarity as the sled moved through the trackless, watery wastes. Low-hanging vines swayed, threatening. A curtain of gray Spanish moss clutched like cobwebs as Chat reached out to part them for the sled’s passage. Cypress snags reared from the swirling water like sharp, hungry teeth. A five-foot cottonmouth slithered from a mangrove tangle and eeled beneath and past the water sled, a fearsome omen.
Flocks of birds and a long-legged white heron fluttered from jungle growth as the whirring air propeller shoved the sled along over grassy marsh, drawing no more draft than a surfboard.
The early sun was a torment, a glare filling the whole of the cloudless sky and stepping up the tempo of the mallets beating inside Chat’s skull.